Being original is overrated
English

Being original is overrated

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education
language learning

Do you remember when you had to write summaries or essays at school? The teacher would inform you that you could not plagiarize your research materials, so they would usually encourage you to "put the ideas into your own words." And this idea of "putting ideas into your own words," is actually a really good practice and habit to have.....

....unless you're learning a language that is really different to your own native language....

I'm currently participating in this mini-challenge put up by my friends over at @the.languagecommunity , and the challenge is for two weeks, to find five new words a day, and write them each in a sentence.

If I was doing this challenge in Portuguese, I wouldn't be writing this post.

As it is, I'm doing the challenge in Russian...

The difficult part of the challenge is not finding the words, those I can find super easy.

The difficult part is trying to create an original sentence in Russian using those words.

So today, I'll admit it, I cheated and posted some sentences from en.openrussian.org

Here's an example of one

Царь был правителем России.

The tsar was the ruler of Russia.

But this is why I have trust issues with Russian and Russian sentences, because sometimes the cases pop in without any good explanation.

The word in particular being "правитель" which means "ruler."

In the above sentence, правител becomes "правителем" which is the instrumental case. But I've only seen the instrumental used in sentences like "я пишу ручкой," as in "I write with a pen."

So... is this an ironclad rule? Is the instrumental case always used after быть in the past tense? Is it the same in the future tense ? Цар будет правителем России?

I really don't know, my level of Russian isn't that good.

It also doesn't help that most grammar explanations online don't have this usage example in there. They're always writing about "I write with a pen" etc etc.

So combine this uncertainty with the fact that there's even more intricacies of case usage, word-order, and completely different words used in natural Russian speech, and you get a cacophony of general blockage in your progress in the language.

All this to say, I definitely need more a crud-ton more input, to collect and repeat native sentences, and to shift my focus to building a different sort of intuition for Russian than how it works in Englihs, or Portuguese.

Пока пока,

Tom

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